Daniel has wanted to be a writer ever since he was in elementary school.He has published stories and articles in such magazines as Slipstream, Black Petals, Spindrift, Zygote in my Coffee, and Leading Edge Science Fiction. He has written four books: The Sage and the Scarecrow (a novel), the Lexical Funk (a short story collection), Reejecttion (short story/ essay collection), and The Ghosts of Nagasaki (a novel).

I could’ve started this review with Joe Trace. Joe Trace is searching for the narrator of this tale in the same way that he was searching for his mother “Wild” in this book. Sometimes, I felt like I needed a tracker to help me track down my own ideas about this book.

At times, the book was so easy and smooth, I just got lost in its many layers. Other times, also when I was lost, I was wondering if there was a destination or things I needed to follow or if getting lost was the whole point of the book.

There was something to this book, a little like slipping, and poetry, and I suppose Jazz, where visions and revisions are not only possible but necessary. After reading the book twice, I couldn’t tell whether the book was a minor key for major emotions or something more.

The City. 1926. There were things about this time that screamed for more concreteness. And yet, we were left with The City and everything radical that that implied -- violence and more violence in the background, and the threat of more violence.

Zanna, a reviewer on Goodreads, said, “sinewy vine, hacked at in places yet blossoming out, covering itself with fresh, lush, resurgent life.” That captures what is best about this book.

I felt like the book was scratching at something that was hard to explain, never truly explicit -- but too loud and emotion-filled to be truly implicit.

Is the book improvised? I can’t say. I can only say that a first draft is often improvised. But was this a first draft, one of many trials and errors, or something that was actually worked over once, twice, thrice, never really improvised but only meant to look improvised. I don’t know that something published can truly be like true Jazz.

Just like Joe Trace, perhaps this book had to evolve. It had to reinvent itself every few other pages or else it feared it wouldn’t survive.